google penalties: the diagnosis & the cure

NINAHALE.COM C O N F I D E N T I A L & P R O P R I E T A R YNINAHALE.COM C O N F I D E N T I A L & P R O P R I E T A R Y

GOOGLE PENALTIES: THE DIAGNOSIS & THE CURE

April 30, 2014

NINAHALE.COM C O N F I D E N T I A L & P R O P R I E T A R Y 2

Jake McCormick

• Search Marketing Manager

• Certified in Google Analytics & BrightEdge

• Experience includes B2B, B2C, eCommerce, lead generation, small business, big business, local SEO & journalism


Peter Quale

• SEO Master Practitioner

• Aquarius

• Likes: Horses, movies, Japanese food

• Dislikes: Musicals,

tight shoes, counterfeit money

• Should message me: If you have any weird stories or questions/thoughts about SEO.


SO, (MAYBE) YOU’VE BEEN PENALIZED!


Organic Traffic Plummets. Rankings Disappear.


Number 1 Rule


Pre-Investigation Caveats

• Bad SEO ≠ Penalty– Natural selection through algorithm updates

• Search results construction– 7-Pack, Knowledge Graph, One-Box, PLAs, etc.

• All penalties are not created equal

• Document, document, document everything


Tom Critchlow’s Penalty Diagnosis Flow Chart

http://nhale.co/mnsearch1


Where to Start: Google Analytics• How much traffic lost? When?• Timeline of known algorithm updates

vs. traffic drops–Mozcast, Algoroo


Where to Start: Webmaster Tools


When is it NOT a Penalty?


OFF-SITE PENALTIES


No Messages, No Problem?

• Good, but…– A diagnostic dead

end–Manual

notifications give you a starting point, direct contact with Google


BACKLINK AUDITS:Your Penalty Accountabilabuddy


Step 1: Backlink Audit Foundation• Historical transparency is crucial– Question 1: Did you pay for links?– Question 2: Are you lying?

• Dredge up all link building documents– Outsourced contracts, strategic plans,

outreach lists, payment receipts, former employees


Step 2: Backlink Compilation

• Use multiple indexes, filter duplicate domains/pages– Google Webmaster Tools–Majestic SEO– Link Research Tools–Moz Open Site Explorer– Ahrefs– Xenu Link Sleuth

• The more links, the better– A handful of bad links don’t trigger a penalty


Step 3: Evaluate Backlinks

• Trends in site type– Industry-related, general directories,

Phillipino mommy blogs

• Linking patterns– If possible, crawl links (highlights patterns)– Pages being linked– Link networks– Site-wide links– Reciprocal links


COMMON VIOLATIONS


Off-Page Violation 1:

Exact Match Anchor Text

• Ratio of homepage vs. internal pages



Links-to-Domain Ratio

35-to-1 link to domain ratio



Irrelevant Content



‘Low Authority’ Sites

• Thin word count, exact match anchor text

Only content on homepage All external links to

same website


More Link Patterns

• Cloaked links• Paid links• Comment, forum links• Who do sites linking to you link to?

Who links to them? (What kind of neighbors do you have?)


Step 4: Link Segmentation

• What “defines” a spam link?–May seem obvious, but not all links are

discoverable via crawler tools–When in doubt, treat as spam

• Organize into spreadsheet– Linking URL– Linked URL– Anchor text– Contact information


Step 5: Request Link Removal

• Website contact form• Network Solutions Whois Tool• LinkedIn• Facebook• Tweet at them – #publicshaming

Again, document everything.

NINAHALE.COM C O N F I D E N T I A L & P R O P R I E T A R Y

Step 6: Disavow Links Tool


ON-SITE PENALTIES


Google Webmaster Tools

• Helps identify:– Duplicate titles/meta descriptions

(content)– Keyword patterns– Index problems– Internal link popularity


Screaming Frog Is Your Best Friend


Site Crawl

• Identifies:– Duplicate content– Keyword stuffing– Broken pages/links– Duplicate meta tags– Click depth– Crawl directives (index, nofollow)


Review Every Page on the Site

• Even one page of spam, poor quality or thin content can hurt an entire site.


COMMON VIOLATIONS


On-Page Violation 1:

‘Thin’ Content

• Generally < 500 words

• No value to users beyond keyword validation

• What’s the ‘intent’ of this page? Used to be a

link



Keyword Stuffing



Exact Match Internal Anchor Text

“Index, follow” footer links + Hard to read text = Fail

Exact match link on homepage…pointing to homepage

Exact match link on homepage…pointing to homepage



Exact Match Internal Anchor Text

• What to do with exact match internal anchor text?

Get rid of them. All of them. Especially site-wide footer links.– If removal is not an option, then

rel=“nofollow”.


More On-Page Violations

• Hidden content• Hidden links• Site-wide footer links• Duplicate content• Anything resembling this:– “Thanks for еvery othеr informative site.

Ԝheгe еlse mɑy јust I ɑm gеtting tҺat type of informаtion written іn ѕuch a perfect mеans?”• Sales Training videos in Hindi


PENALTY-PROOFING YOUR SITE


Know Your Exact Site Size

• Crawl your site regularly– Screaming Frog–Microsoft IIS SEO

Toolkit

• Compare the results to Google and Bing Indexes


Know Your Exact Site Size

• Maintain a highly accurate sitemap.xml file.

• Reconcile submitted URLs vs. crawled URLs.


Best Medicine of All

• Writing better content!

• Never discount the value of a good content strategy guiding excellent writers.

• If you need help:– http://www.hemingwayapp.com – Really

spruces up lousy copy!– https://readability-score.com – Analyzes text

and provides four different test scores

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

http://www.hemingwayapp.com/

https://readability-score.com/

https://readability-score.com/


Writing for Hummingbird

• “How is the searcher asking for something?”

• Expand FAQs and support copy to attract inquiry based searches:–Who, what, why, where and how– Conversational search– Siri, Google Now, MS Cortana


PRECAUTIONS


Precautions:

Protect your IP address


Precautions:

Require a Host Header!

Revenge Domains• CrabbyStewardess.com• AssyAir.com• Plane-Crash-Today.com

Spoofed Exact Match Domains• Best-Detroit-Travel-4-Kids.com• Spirit-Airlines-Air-Travel-Planes.com• SpiritSpiritSpiritSpirit.com


Precautions:

Blog Spam

• If you have a blog attached to a big brand, make sure comments are NOT open. Comment spamming is the easiest way to attack a site.

• If comments must remain open, moderate them and block IPs from spam offenders.


Precautions:

Content Scraping

• Do occasional exact match searches on your content to make sure it has not been scraped.

• Especially important for employment listings, directories and blogs.


Takeaways

• The penalty investigation process is time-consuming, critical, and simple

• Document, document, document everything

• Recovery has no “one size fits all” timetable

• Fix your penalties all at once and as quickly as you can


NOW, RELAX.

It’s all going to turn out fine.


QUESTIONS?

Thanks to the great people at MnSearch for having us and thank YOU!

Jake McCormick – @Jake_BrewHoopPeter Quale – @pbq

Art by Danial Ryan - http://danial-ryan.tumblr.com/

google penalties: the diagnosis & the cure

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